THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,532-34) The Cleves — “Nowhere”/”Down on the Farm”/”Don’t Turn Your Back”
From New Zealand’s Abbey Road, here is part of a suite of perfect pop rock songs written for a short film by the to-be-famous Australian director Peter Weir.
I thought I was so creative in describing the songs as such — until I read Grant Gillanders saying the same thing! —
In 1970 the [Cleves] were commissioned to write and record the music for a short film calledMichael, directed by a pre-Hollywood Peter Weir. The resulting soundtrack was released as an EP and is a 16-minute, 10-part suite of near perfect pop music segued together to form a thematic whole in a style not to dissimilar to side two of The Beatles’Abbey Road.
I thought of it before I read that, I swear!
MilesaGo: Australasian popular music,pop cultureand social history 1964-1975 says:
Michael won the Grand Prix at the 1970 AFI [Australian Film Institute] Awards. . . . Along with the Bee Gees-like track “Don’t Turn Your Back”, the EP featured songs recorded for the soundtrack, segued together to form a thematic whole, which “combined certain elements of the British music hall tradition (as espoused by The Beatles) with a more esoteric pop flavour a la The Move”.
The Cleves were a brilliant Kiwi brand composed essentially of three siblings that was destined for great things. But it is a b*tch how things ended.
Grant Gillanders tells us:
[T]he Brown siblings, Graham, Ron and Gaye, grew up on the family farm [in Clevedon]. . . . In the early sixties, with Gaye learning piano and Graham receiving drum lessons . . . Bill Brown arranged for his three children to have singing and choreography lessons withPat McMinn of ‘Opo the Crazy Dolphin’ fame. It was at an early talent quest when Ron and Graham were performing as a duo, that they were first introduced as “The Clevedonaires” . . . and the name stuck. . . . While still at school during 1963, The Clevedonairesstarted to become a bit moreserious about their music and decided to form a four-piece band. School friend and neighbour Milton Lanewas recruited on rhythm guitar and took his place alongside Ron (guitar) and Graham (drums), while Gaye was weened off the piano to handle the bass duties. . . . Proud parents Bill and Joy Brown supplied the emotional encouragement and support while physically handling the day-to-day management and transportation duties. . . . Ron [recalls] “Later on when we got a little bit older it wasn’t very cool to have the olds in view, so we used to send them away and arrange for them to pick us up later.” The Clevedonaires quickly built up a good local reputation with a mix of Shadows instrumentals, pop hits of the day and four-part harmony folk numbers. . . . [B]y late 1965 they were mixing it in the competitive Auckland city scene where they played at some of the top venues . . . . [T]hey were spotted by promoter and record label ownerBenny Levin, who signed them to his new record label, Impact Records. Local songwriter Darryl Lawrence submitted two songs in a semi folk style to Benny for consideration as their debut single – ‘How You Lied’ and ‘Rooftops and Chimneys’. Both songs were subsequently recorded and released as the group’s first single. Although not a chart hit the record found favourable reviews . . . . By late 1966 the group had amassed a repertoire of 300 songs with Gaye now assuming the role of musical director . . . . During the day Graham, Ron and Milton helped out on their respective family farms while Gaye finished her schooling. . . . Milton found the workload too heavy and decided to leave. Enter Rob Aickin.. . . [who] took over the bass guitar from Gaye, who in turn introduced keyboards to the group’s sound, which was in the process of changing to a more rockier format. “We decided to drop the folky stuff from our repertoire,” reflects Ron, “and started doing a lot more of the harder edged British stuff from The Animals, The Kinks and The Yardbirds etc.” The new harder-edged sound . . . manifested itself on . . . their second single, released in March 1967. . . . The group auditioned forThe We 3, a weekly television magazine show aimed at teenagers. . . . [and were] picked . . . as [the] resident group . . . . [F]our days before their first TV appearance . . . their mother Joy died suddenly. Two further singles were released on the Impact labels . . . The Clevedonaires were approached by an Australian entrepreneur to do a four month tour, entertaining American troops in Vietnam. . . . The group quit their day jobs and canceled all engagements for a month to concentrate on rehearsals . . . . [But] halfway through . . . rehearsals [came] the 1968 Tet Offensive . . . . [T]he group had no option but to pull out of the contract. . . . [They] decided to try their luck in Sydney. . . . head[ing] to the ski resort town of Cooma . . . where Benny Levin had arranged a regular gig at the Cooma Hotel. . . . Gaye recalls . . . . [“]We lasted for about two weeks before it got too much for us, so we rang Benny to get us out of the deal and we ended up playing in the Hume Hotel in the Sydney suburb of Yagoona.” . . . The Cleves (they now shortened their name) built up an unprecedented following among Sydneysiders who nightly would beat a path to the Hume Hotel. . . . [T]he group backed Dinah Lee for several nights at the Hume. Dinah was so impressed that she arranged for her road manager Bobi Petch to hear them perform . . . . [He] worked for Cordon Bleu Promotions, one of the top agencies in Sydney. This resulted in the group becoming the resident band at Lucifer’s, a new discotheque in Sydney, and signing up with . . . Cordon Bleu . . . . [T]he group returned home in December, 1968 . . . . After several engagements in . . . South Auckland . . . the[y] headed to Mount Maunganui for a summer engagement . . . . Once back in [Sydney] . . . they were in constant demand. . . . The Cleves’ first Australian recording was a promotional single made for . . . The Tintookies, a large-scale puppet show on Aboriginal history. The Cleveswere approached . . . to perform at the after party for the Australian premiere of . . . Hairon 4 June, 1969 . . . . the party of the decade in Australia, with a veritable who’s who of the Australian music industry in attendance. The Cleves impressed all who attended . . . . [and] were signed by Festival Records shortly afterwards and started working with with ace producer Pat Aulton . . . . The poppy and almost vaudevillian “Sticks & Stones” was released . . . to glowing reviews . . . . Although not a chart hit . . . [it] received enough airplay to keep The Cleves’ name on everybody’s lips and complemented the glowing live reviews . . . . The . . . second single “You And Me” was released during May 1970, the same month that they made their 100th appearance on Australian television. . . . In late 1970 the group started work on their . . . . debut album . . . described by . . . Ian McFarlaneas “a prime example of where psychedelic pop gave way to a more progressive aesthetic”. . . . With a heavy touring schedule lined-up, Gaye was exhausted and unwell, so she took four months off and the group recruited Vince Melhouney(ex-Bee Gees) on guitar to fulfill their engagements. With an offer from Helen Reddy’s manager to tour the United States on the table, The Cleves instead took advice from . . . Melhouney who suggested . . . the UK. Recently married, Graham Brown decided to leave and was replaced by Ace Follington . . . The Cleves boarded the ship to the UK with two objectives in mind, first to write a batch of new songs and second to change the group’s name to something a bit more tougher sounding to reflect their new songs.
The new name was Bitch. Gillanders writes that:
Bitch found the biggest PA system they could find and set out toblow the roof off the Speakeasy. This paid instant dividends when several labels started bidding for them before they had even finished their set. In the end Warner Bros. made the best offer and quickly signed them to a NZ$50,000 contract. Warners sent them to Spring Cottage in East Sussex with instructions to take their time, write more material for an album, and – just as importantly – to write ahitrecord. . . . The single “Good Time Coming’ and tracks for the album were recorded at Morgan Studios . . . . [It] was a regional Top 10 hit in Germany and Holland . . . . With the album in the can and the relative success of the first single, the group was booked into George Martin’s famous AIR Studios in Central London to record the follow-up single “Wildcat” . . . . Bitch did what they did best and hit the club scene with abandon, and as in Australia, soon endeared themselves to fans and journalists alike.. . . Bill Harman, the group’s manager [recalls:] “The band were signed to the Warners arm of WEA records, an English amalgamation of US labels Warner Bros., Elektra and Atlantic. The album had been mastered and was complete, including artwork, when disaster struck. . . . When the A&R department of WEA found a new talent they would, in consultation with the parent companies, sign them to one of their three labels. Around the middle of 1973, when the Bitch album was all ready to go, the bosses of each of the three labels in the US became worried that the next Led Zeppelin would walk through the doors in the London office and promptly get signed to one of the other two labels. Consequently, they agreed to wind up WEA and proceed to operate as three separate labels in the UK. Former CBS UK boss Robbie Robinson, an accountant by trade, was put in as caretaker at Warners . . . . [and] was not prepared to action anything that involved company expenditure. This included distributing the Bitch album. Things dragged on for months and culminated in the Bitch recording deal being scrapped and the album ditched.”
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